At Last
by elphabathedelirious32
Summary: Three years after she found her home spattered with blood, Elphaba is a shadow of herself, hidden in a mauntery. Can anything anyone bring her back? Fiyeraba.
1. At Last

**A/N: This is a random story I've been toying with for a while. It could be a oneshot or not, tell me what you think! It's set about three years after Elphaba tried to kill Mme. Morrible, in the mauntery. **

**Disclaimer: It's GM's, not mine. **

"Liir, please let go of my skirts."

Her voice was a whisper, but a harsh one. Nonetheless, the small grubby boy shook his dark head, shoved his thumb in his mouth, and continued clutching the young maunt's skirts with the other hand. Elphaba made a low _tsk_-ing sound and fixed Liir with an unblinking _look_.

The boy was two years old and tried best he could to follow her everywhere, frustrating her like mad and getting in her way at every turn, but worst of all making her think of things she'd much rather forget.

Already, secretly, she'd broken her vow of silence- several times due to him. Her whispered admonitions were one thing, but then, when he was a baby, for some odd reason she'd been assigned to care for him. The older maunts had almost seemed to be _pushing _the child onto her. So often when she had been sent up to care for the infant, he would cry and fluster her completely, exasperate her fair to death as she tried to calm him down, as she was no dab hand in the nursery- she'd do something she knew she could, and sing to him.

She sang nursery rhymes she remembered from her own childhood, but seeing as how they were Nanny's, they were usually less appropriate for children than they were witty for adults, she sang hymns she'd heard there, at the mauntery, she sang songs she'd made up herself, sang thoughts she could not say or even think to their fullest measure. Singing, she was _Elphaba_, like it or not, and she usually didn't.

Now, though, she didn't sing, and so was less herself. Selfishly, she became selfless- denying the world her distinctness and defiance, her nonconformity, so that she could forget- things.

Nonetheless, she was still Elphaba in short snatches of irritation (usually Liir's doing) and when she was, things troubled her. More specifically, _Liir. _

She'd come here just shy of three years ago, and spent a year in coma-sleep. The boy was just two. She could do math.

He had hair as dark as hers, he looked like Nessarose, or, rather, Shell. He looked, she thought sometimes, accidentally, a bit like Fiyero. But that twisted her heart and made her want to retch, made her feel slick blood on her hands, burning tears on her face, smell the awful stench of congealing blood, made stomach and heart rise to her throat with inconceivable grief- so she pushed it away. Other things about Liir troubled her, too- he was two, and he hadn't yet spoken. He wasn't slow, she knew that much about children. She could tell that much from looking in his eyes or just seeing him play. He could obey, although he usually didn't obey her. And then there was this: when she'd woken up and been assigned to care for Liir, her breasts had been larger and sore and dripped milk. But she didn't care to think about her own body, for it led to thoughts of another's, pressed up against hers, blue diamonds on emerald skin- so she thought of something else.

Once, though, when Liir had fallen and a bruise had come on his shin, it was tinged as green as her own.

But that- all of it- only served to remind her of someone it served her sanity better to forget, not to mention her heart. And so she tried to keep Liir at a distance, but he didn't want to be kept. He had latched onto her, with all her spikiness, like a stupid motherless duckling.

And so he had broken away from the cluster of small orphan children playing in the courtyard to follow her at her tasks in the garden. "Liir, _please_," she hissed. Just then, the sounds of Mother Maunt arguing with- was that a man's voice- drifted through the open doors of the main building.

"I know she's here. I know it. How? Some old woman told me. Please, ma'am, just let me in, I'm not going to do any-" the man burst forth into the garden. Everyone stopped moving and stared. Elphaba's heart thudded. _No, it can't be_…

"Fae?" yelled the man- Fiyero, it was Fiyero, there he came into the light and it was- "Elphaba, are you here?" He turned then, and he saw her. Liir, who had never seen a man before, hid behind her skirts. She looked at Fiyero, across the yard, and words failed her. He ran to her, limping slightly, thinner than he had been, but _alive_, gloriously alive, and he wrapped his arms around her and they kissed as the maunts stared, half horrified, half-enraptured, and the children gawked, and little Liir clung to his mother's skirts as his father held her, at last, in his arms again.


	2. Liir

**A/N: I have obviously now decided not to make this a oneshot, so…here goes nothing. **

**Disclaimer: What, I wrote this fanfiction now you expect me to think of a clever disclaimer? It's GM's. **

"Sister Saint Aelphaba!"

Mother Maunt's voice cut through the still air like a knife. Elphaba pulled out of Fiyero's arms and turned to look at the older woman uncertainly.

"What is the meaning of this?" Mother Maunt asked. Elphaba's eyes darted as she tried to think of something that could possibly sum up the past two years.

"Horrors," she said. It had worked before.

"What!"

"Horrors," added a thin, unfamiliar voice. Everyone turned to look at the little boy still clutching Elphaba's skirt. "Horrors," said Liir. Elphaba covered her mouth with her hand in shock.

"Please, enlighten us," Mother Maunt said to Elphaba, who was fighting a strong feeling of déjà vu.

"I came here because I thought Fiyero was dead, and I had nowhere to go," she said slowly. "All the blood- was his blood. I was sure he couldn't have survived that, and then…I decided to stay here, when I woke up. I don't know why. I don't know why any of this happened."

"And this, I presume, is Fiyero?"

Fiyero made a courtly bow.

Elphaba, her self already returning, rolled her eyes at this. "Yes," she said.

"But what I want to know," said Fiyero, "is who _this _is?" he pointed at Liir, who hid.

"I'm sure I don't know," said Elphaba. "No one's ever cared to enlighten _me _on the subject."

Mother Maunt remained silent.

Fiyero looked at Elphaba, drinking her in.

"I can't tell," he said after a moment.

"Can't tell what?" asked Elphaba.

"Whether you've had a baby," he said.

"And if I can't tell, Yero, what in Oz makes you think you could?"

"Experience," said Fiyero calmly.

Mother Maunt, it appeared, could withstand no more.

"Enough!" she said sharply. "For everyone's sake, please, you two, get into my office." She began to walk away, then paused. "And bring the boy," she added.

…

"So," said Mother Maunt, "you're leaving us, then?"

"Yes," said Elphaba firmly, looking up. For the first time, the older woman noticed the novice's remarkably clear hazel eyes and the look of thinly veiled defiance sparking in them. The young woman was changing before her eyes, it seemed. Her head was held high, her chin tilted up and her voice clear and firm. She looked taller now that she was no longer bent over, and, despite her green skin, radiant.

"Very well, then," said the maunt. "On one condition."

"What?" asked Fiyero, sounding as though he meant, _Not that you can stop her leaving anyway. _

"You bring the boy Liir with you."

"What? Why?" asked Elphaba.

"Because," said Mother Maunt, "he is your son."


	3. Discovery

**A/N: I guess I left this story out in the cold for a while, too. Ah, well. **

**Disclaimer: Not mine. **

They left the mauntery in silence. Not even Liir, with his newfound capacity for speech, spoke a word. They stayed the night at an inn in the Emerald City.

They fed Liir dinner and put him to sleep and then they fell into bed with each other, exploring the strange yet familiar terrain of each other's bodies.

Elphaba found his scar and kissed it, a benediction from a tainted maunt who claimed she had no soul. Fiyero found upon her the small, hidden, marks of pregnancy she had never dared expressly search for and traced them or kissed them where they fell below the line of where she would be touched by hands.

Her elegant long fingers ran through his hair and danced along his diamonds. He wound the precious onyx coils of her spun-coffee hair around his wrists and pulled her forward, and they brought each other back from the dead.

Afterwards, she asked him for his story and he for hers.

"I saw your blood," she said. "I had a breakdown. I found myself at the mauntery of the church where you found me before. I stayed in a coma for a year. I woke up, and I had nowhere else to go. I couldn't think about you without feeling like I was going to break down again, and I couldn't feel at all. So I didn't. And then you came. And here we are," she finished. "So."

He noted the strange hesitant quality of her voice, the way her sentences grew from short and stiff to slowly longer and more expressive, and then fell back again.

"So," he echoed. "I followed you that night. I got back before you did, though. There were Gale Forcers there. They beat me to within an inch of my life, then dragged me off. They tried interrogating me a few times at the beginning, then once this past year. But it was obvious I knew less than they did, so they let me go when I threatened to have the Vinkus secede and rebel. And then I searched for you. Finally, some creepy old woman named Yackle told me you were in the mauntery."

"But-but that's not possible," she breathed. "Yackle was _in _the mauntery! She couldn't have left!"

Fiyero stared a moment.

"You know, she was there that night," he said.

"What night?"

"At the Philosophy Club."

The two lovers stared at each other.

The silence was only broken by a murmur from their young son, in his sleep.

"Horrors", he muttered again. "Horrors."


End file.
